Creative Career Building: Wisdom vs the Bugbear of Education

I like books. You know why? They don’t cost anything so long as you have a library card. And if you know how to use them they provide endless free education.

If our society can provide books for free, why can’t we get health care – er, nevermind, this column isn’t about that.

A few years ago a friend of mine used a single book to inspire a journal of personal discovery that lead to a much more satisfying career. She had been working at Enron (before the scandal and collapse) but while she made good money, she wasn’t fulfilled. She got a hold of the book What Color is Your Parachute, and unlike most people when they read a self-help book, she thoroughly followed the book’s advice. In other words, she worked for it. And as a result, she got out of Enron before the proverbial shit hit the fan and eventually became a Spanish teacher – a career she loves.

There are many other good books for helping people find themselves so to speak. These are literary works which give us perspective and help us form a flesh-out worldview. I read Walden the summer after I graduated high school, and it still influences me twelve years later.

Other books are good for helping people figure out what to do once they know who they are and what they want to do. For loosey-goosey free-lancers such as myself, Paul and Sarah Edwards’s book Working From Home has been immensely helpful.

But like any other education, no book will help a person unless the person also helps themselves. Like my friend, we all have to work for it, whether that means taking the time for mental digestion of an idea or leaning how to develop a press list.

If we want to escape the world of Dilbert, we must do no less than work hard, think outside of the box, and find our passion.

And so I come to my point: I find it highly regrettable that the system of higher education in this country keeps greedily monopolizing training for careers which people used to learn on the job. In other words, making people pay for what they used to get paid for. Public school teachers, for instance, are required to acquire increasingly specific certification these days. What that means in practice is that someone like me – who has a Masters in Fine Art and 5 years of diverse art teaching experience including two years at a private school and 3 with a highly regarded community service program – cannot even apply for a crappy art teacher job at a Philadelphia public school without getting (and paying through the nose for) an entirely new degree.

My husband is a sleep technologist, although his degrees are in Political Science and History. However, he slipped just under the wire, and now his profession – which he is very good at despite his humanities degrees – would be out of reach for people without more specialized higher education.

These days even journalists are expected to get a degree in journalism – although by law this cannot be required.

While in art school, I eventually found it odd that art degrees were even offered at standard colleges and universities. Look at the history of art training, and you see apprentices working under master artists and craftspeople. But in academia, art students often receive mediocre training in the actual crafts of painting, drawing, and sculpture, and end up having to read a bunch of out-of-touch theory and write papers and artist statements. And to top it off, they rarely receive any education on how to make a living as a professional artist. Getting a degree in art is often like four years of floating through Romper Room. I once remember a student getting a C for a class that he showed up for only three times the entire semester and did a fraction of the work that his classmates did. The rest of us received As. With such standards, what is an A even worth?

It makes me wonder what other college degrees programs are often a bit bogus. Especially considering the rising cost of higher education. Consider this:

A student who gives up accepting a job right of high school paying $25,000 a year to attend school full time will incur a $25,000 per year opportunity cost. Add to that the cost of tuition and books and it is not unusual to add another $10,000 and more per year to the educational investment. If we assume that this individual will start at $33,000 right out of college, and that they will experience the same rate of growth over their careers, they would be financially better off ($50,000 in present value terms) without the college degree. Borrowing to finance the tuition costs would only make the deficit larger.

In Season 3 of “Bullshit”, Penn and Teller (note that Penn Gillette does not have a college degree, and Teller doesn’t use his in his lucrative career as a magician) took on the issue of what a college degree is worth:

College degrees will lead us to future happiness, enlightenment, fun, preparation for life, a fulfilling job, as well as national prosperity. At least, that's what we've been told and sold. That's brochure bullshit! Been to a college lately? Rather than beacons of enlightenment, colleges have become bloated 400 billion dollar a year corporations, islands isolated from the real world, treacherous minefields where free speech and individual liberty often get trampled. And not only that, but going to college offers no sure path to an enriching life…or even a blue-collar job!

And this month, Walt Gardner wrote College is not a must in a changing economy:

The usual argument put forth in defense of a four-year degree is that it contains a decided wage premium. Studies have consistently found that those who have a degree on average earn more than those who don't. . But all these studies were conducted before the new global economy fully emerged. Its presence calls into question long-held assumptions.

If Alan Blinder, former vice chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, is correct, the only jobs that will be secure in the next decade will those that cannot be sent abroad electronically. That means plumbers, electricians, and auto mechanics, for example, will be working steadily while many of their degreed classmates will be collecting unemployment checks.

Gardner goes on to warn how pushing college prep courses such as Algebra I at the high school level only hurts poor and minority students by increasing the drop out rate:

For schools serving large numbers of poor and minority students, the results are expected to be disproportionately felt. That's because career and technical education, which has proved instrumental in the past in boosting graduation rates for these students, will lose more funding to accommodate the Algebra 1 mandate.

Even if the funding were somehow to materialize, however, tens of thousands of students will not be allowed to enroll in vocational electives in middle school if they haven't mastered Algebra 1. This unintended consequence has become so threatening that the presidents of the California Manufacturers and Technology Association and the State Building and Construction Trades have jointly denounced the requirement.

I had a conversation recently with someone who worked as a social worker for teens about thirty years ago. He told me that he and his coworkers typically told the kids to either get a factory job or join the military. The problem with such advice today is that the factory jobs aren’t there, and as for the military… well, duh. I work with social workers today as a teaching artist, and now they tell the kids stay in school and go to college. But many of the teens I work with can barely write a coherent paragraph, much less hack college.

One definition of a bugbear is “a goblin that eats up naughty children."

I feel that this is what education – as it is often discussed in political and social discourse - is becoming for many kids and young adults in our society. We keep saying they need more “education” but we don’t stop and consider what kind of education they need. Someone is educated whenever they are exposed to any new experience, whether it is walking through a new neighborhood, reading a novel, or learning arithmetic. Kids today need to have an imagination and to be able to keep themselves informed about both history and current times as much as they need basic math and reading skills, otherwise they’ll never get ahead. And schools too often cram 30 or 40 kids into a class with one burned-out teacher, where they’re treated like dogs and taught to punch in, do what your told, and punch out. In other words, public schools are preparing poor kids for jobs that just don’t exist for them anymore, and then social workers are pushing the pipe dream of college because they just don’t know what else to say.

Education can be a bugbear to middle class kids, too, who drink and party away their college experience instead of actually trying to educate themselves.

Oftentimes we’ll read in the news that there is an increased demand for people with specific training, such as Computer Programmers. The idea is to encourage college students to major in these subjects and fill the job gaps. But the problem is that if someone gets a degree because they assume that someone will just hand them a well-paying job at some point in the future, they probably aren’t very into the subject, and therefore won’t be very good at the tasks the job involves. And now, around the world, Computer Science graduates have a higher unemployment rate than most other college degrees!

To further complicate issues, though many subjects such as art are more of a trade than academic subject, trade schools can even worse than standard colleges:

nearly every developer I've talked to on the matter has said that a general computer science (or fine art, digital media, or what have you) degree from a good university is worth infinitely more than a specialized trade school degree. A few lucky souls may wind up producing art or doing programming for projects directly out of trade school, but for the vast majority, unemployment at the hands of a limited skill set will be the unfortunate reality.

I see commercials for places like this all the time on television, and feel a tinge of disgust with the people who perpetuate such pie in the sky.

There is no friggin’ short cut. There is no simple set of instructions that one can just follow by rote and end up with an awesome, well-paying, and personally satisfying career. It is all risk. Life is risk. Think of all the factory workers who after watching their fathers support big families on blue collar wages and retire well, then had their own retirements slashed or their jobs deported. No one is ever completely safe. Primitive humans evolved into existence hunting and foraging for subsistence on a daily basis, and at the bare-bones level, not much has changed.

So if you happen to have a passion, educate yourself and then work your ass off. And if you don’t have a passion, get a tolerable Dilbert-type job that pays well, gives good health insurance, and vacation days so you will at least fully enjoy the other 50% of your waking hours. Or, hell, if it suits you, be like the guy who lives down the street from me and start a car washing business out of your home.

Embrace your inner caveman (or woman) and simply find some way to bring home dead meat and berries. Yawlp!